Duck, Sucker: A review 36 years in the making

And from the heavens fell a film. A great film. A Sergio Leone film. And the world was good.  


Many audiences have found and enjoyed Leone’s “lost” film Duck, You Sucker or, as it’s been widely known, A Fistful of Dynamite. But not until June, with the release of the Sergio Leone Anthology, did us silly ’Mericans get a good, long glimpse of the original edit of the quasi-western. Since its 1971 release, it’s been hacked up, gutted and pretty much devoured by a variety of editors, and even then it still never landed a wide-scale American release. Maybe movie enthusiasts didn’t make enough of a fuss about it in ’71 to make it a classic, or maybe moviegoers were still gushing about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West for Sucker to get its share of praise. Maybe, dare I say it, people didn’t like it … (gasp here). I wasn’t around, so I can’t speculate further. But I can recommend it now that it has an official release inside the Leone Anthology, which also features Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” Spaghetti Westerns — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Sucker stars James Coburn as John Mallory, an IRA explosives expert, who is drawn to Mexico as a hired demo-expert during a Mexican revolution (or maybe the Mexican Revolution). Rod Steiger — in the form of a smelly bare-footed peasant with the ferocity of a lion and the accent of Tony Montana off his medication — plays the sucker, Juan Miranda, a Mexican bandit pillaging under the skirt of a great frontier. The Irishman and the Mexican meet during a hold-up on a lonely road. Juan shoots out John’s motorcycle tire, so John returns the favor by blowing up Juan’s stagecoach. The explosion is preceded by the first of three references to the title: “Duck, you sucker,” John tells Juan as his various sons and fathers, all bandits as well, run for cover. In typical Leone style, this chance encounter makes up the entire first act of the movie, stretching to the absolute breaking point when Juan exhaustingly convinces the IRA thug to join in on a bank robbery.

Just as the movie saddles its burros (do burros even where saddles?) to head off for a bank heist, it drastically switches gears as John and Juan find political prisoners, not bags of gold coins, inside the bank’s vaults. Leone, with that sleight of hand worthy of a Vegas table, follows his cowboy opera Once Upon a Time in the West, a moving musical picture about railroads and redemption, with another movie about loftier goals than gold bars or bags of loot. In a way, it’s a buddy picture set against the Mexican Revolution, the same way Good/Bad/Ugly was a buddy flick amid the Civil War. Although it was lost in time and space somewhere between video stores and the Spanish frontiers where it was filmed — and after better pictures nonetheless — Sucker is the quintessential Leone picture: the music, of course by Ennio Morricone, is rich and layered deep within Sucker’s dirty skin; the plot is an allegory involving race and friendship, and the trust that binds them together; the tempo is methodical and intricate, not the kind of 158-minute movie you step into halfway through; and the cinematography is picturesque if “picturesque” can also describe dusty, blistering landscapes chock full of machine gun nests, pre-planted explosive packs and ambushing revolutionaries.

It should also be noted that the body count of Duck, You Sucka is high enough to get mentioned on a United Nations watch list. As soon as the two protagonists arrive in the bank’s keeper city, an Orwellian western town called Mesa Verde, armed patrols start executing political dissidents. And once they start, they don’t stop. Soldiers are mowed down with machine guns, revolutionaries (including children) are blasted mercilessly in a cave and a derailed train makes for a bloody turkey shoot. In one uninterrupted long take, the camera pans across several concrete corrals of political prisoners as soldiers rain hot lead down onto their heads in a genocidal rage. Before that John and Juan stage a firefight that ends with results so conclusive that it may be the only time in cinematic history an entire army is defeated in a fraction of a second. For comparisons to other films, I consulted Movie Body Counts, a morbidly fun site that counts the dead in action films. The top five body-count movies: two Lord of the Rings movies, where computer war sequences rack up nearly 1,200 dead; John Woo’s Hard Boiled, in which bad guys inexplicably shoot evacuating patients as they flee a hospital under siege; We Were Soldiers, with lots of dead American and North Vietnamese soldiers; and Equilibrium, with Christian Bale dispatching sci-fi cops with geometrical kung fu. Duck, You Sucka isn’t listed on the site … yet. If it were, I would put its body count well into the 500s, thus high in the top five list.

Body count aside, though, this sweltering hunk of a film is a wonderful addition to your Eastwood/Leone pictures. Don’t expect it to be like the Eastwood pictures, or even so much like its sister film, Once Upon a Time in the West; just expect a truly unique Leone experience. He brings it to you gift-wrapped from 1971.